D.J. Flynn

Thrilled to receive this @FundlaCaixa grant w/ @cxlastra to study teen digital literacy in Spain & Portugal. We’ll develop age-appropriate curricular and motivational treatments and an app to measure individualized misinfo exposure …servatoriosocial.fundacionlacaixa.org/en/-/social-re…

Análisis de 32 millones de tweets de representantes políticos de 26 países durante 6 años: los partidos ultraderechistas son los principales responsables de difundir bulos e información falsa.

One of our most important findings—one’s support for “tolerance” in the abstract does not increase the willingness to tolerate one’s political opponents.

I was talking to an economics Assistant Professor today frustrated with the profession. A few years into his job and he's struggling with the last mile of his papers & trying to get them published in the right places. He said it'll get better. The problem: he's only partly right.

From our February Issue: A New Measure of Affective Polarization by NICOLAS CAMPOS and CHRISTOPHER FEDERICO. doi.org/10.1017/S00030…

"Don't let other people write your paper." Economic sciences laureate Daron Acemoglu spoke to nine students around the world and shared his best career advice. Watch the full conversation: youtu.be/K3_B4CyGpdo?si…

"The six Republican-appointed justices have found a magical solution to polarization. All you have to do is take a partisan election result and subtract out the effects of party loyalty...[And] party isn’t a variable that operates independently of race." open.substack.com/pub/gelliottmo…

Newly updated working paper out on this topic, using exogenous C-SPAN channel positioning for identification. (with the peerless @gloriagennaro)

President Obama wanted to honor America's 250th anniversary with something special... Then Larry David called. Life, Larry and The Pursuit of Unhappiness premieres June 26 on HBO Max.

"Writing is hard." Thrilled to share that this simple idea led to a new paper in @polanalysis. Most text methods focus on content. I test if expression is also effortful action and find measures like character counts reveal attitudes and predict voting. cup.org/4cUmoXi 1/

John Roberts increasingly the Susan Collins of SCOTUS. Always very concerned, swears he and his colleagues aren’t doing what they’re obviously doing, provides a veneer of moderation when all the others are flying insurrection flags over their houses.

Counterpoint: the Justices are good at figuring out what they think about a case of this magnitude, and Neal’s four coaches had zero effect on the outcome. I don’t think I have ever seen a SCOTUS advocate claim so much personal credit for a win before…yeesh.

From our FirstView: Partisan Expressive Responding: Lessons from Two Decades of Research by MATTHEW H. GRAHAM doi.org/10.1017/S00030…

"We show that, depending on how the impact of omitted variables is measured, it can be substantially easier for omitted variables to flip coefficient signs than to drive them to zero."

There really should be organized pushback from societies/associations. I am surprised that we have gone deep into the minutia of other aspsects of research, but largely let IRBs operate with impunity. I guess fear of retribution is powerful

IRBs began as a response to real abuses in human-subjects research. Fair enough. But like a lot of well-intentioned bureaucracies, they’ve drifted far from their original mission. Too often, they now function as one more checkpoint in the Conformity Gauntlet—another way unpopular research can be delayed, distorted, or quietly killed. New piece from @TheFIREorg's @natehoneycutt & @RynoWeiss on why this matters.

In today's bonus "One First," I wrote about the critiques of the NYT Clean Power Plan cases scoop—and how they're are deflecting from the serious evidence it provides that #SCOTUS treats presidents differently on the emergency docket depending upon party: stevevladeck.com/p/bonus-221-sa…

Not surprisingly, these court cases often center on same-sex parents, that is, not parents who are divorced, or divorced and remarried, or have children out of wedlock, or aren't in comformity with Catholic teachings in many other ways. What about, e.g., denying an education to a child of a parent who committed white-collar crime? Or the child of a parent who is not paying a just wage? It's the selectivity of these cases that many LGBTQ people notice. Moreover, a child should not be denied an education for any perceived failings of the parents. If Catholic schools provided education only to the children of sinless parents whose lives were 100% in conformity with church teachings, the classrooms would be empty. nytimes.com/2026/04/20/us/…

From our FirstView: Race, Responsiveness, and Representation in U.S. Lawmaking by @markarian_g, JACOB S. HACKER, @lockhartm and ZOLTAN HAJNAL. doi.org/10.1017/S00030…

Do (metacognitive) awareness messages about partisan bias in policy evaluation reduce that partisan bias? Here is a review of findings exploring that problem: ubwp.buffalo.edu/jopblog/2026/0… Here is the original article: journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…

This new paper calls into question the quality of many scales used by psychologists to measure authoritarianism (eg RWA) as they are badly confounded with socio-cultural differences. However, the six item measure of "Political Intolerance" seems to be the best cross-cultural measure of authoritarianism, suggesting that the disapproval of belief diversity might be a core aspect of authoritarianism. Items on this Intolerance scale a focused on depriving political dissidents of rights (e.g., “People who disagree with me politically deserve the same rights as I do.”), emphasizing norm abiding behavior (e.g., “people with beliefs that are outside of the norm have a right to express their views”), and using strong government to deter norm violations (e.g., “Radical beliefs should be suppressed by government”). osf.io/preprints/psya…